longer should have many wives, like brute beasts, as though born for the mere propagation of the species, and then that they should not be adulterers, and then that they should go on to continence, and from continence to virginity, when having trained themselves to despise the flesh, they sail fearlessly into the peaceful haven of immortality.” Marriage, according to this writer, was not abolished by Christ, but it was a state of inferiority. “For I think,” he makes a virgin say, “I have gathered clearly from the Scriptures that after the Word had brought in virginity, He did not altogether abolish the generation of children; for though the moon may be greater than the stars, the light of the other stars is not destroyed by the moonlight.” There thus arose the gradation of virgins, widows, and wives. Tertullian[142] speaks of wives as women of the second degree of modesty who have fallen into wedlock. The current of thought which I have exhibited displays itself, first of all, in the condemnation of second marriages. The Apostle Paul permitted these, and the Church could not forbid them. In the Pastor of Hermas they are not condemned, but Athenagoras[143] raises his voice against them. “He who deprives himself,” he says, “of his first wife, even though she be dead, is a cloaked adulterer.” The argument used against them was that God made husband and wife one flesh, and one flesh they remained, even after the death of one of them. If they were one flesh, how could a second woman be added to them? She could not become _one_ flesh. Tertullian,[144] diverging from the Catholic to the Montanistic faith, maintained that a second marriage was equal to a marriage with two wives at one time, and therefore forbidden. But whatever their arguments were, at the root of the opinion lay the ascetic tendency of thought. This is seen in Tertullian[145], who wrote a treatise addressed to his wife, admonishing her not to marry again if he died first. In speaking of the resurrection he says to her: “There will at that day be no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us”; and in another treatise he remarks: “Let us ponder over our consciousness itself to see how different a man feels himself when he chances to be deprived of his wife. He savours spiritually.”[146] Tertullian, for his age, is exceptional in the strength of his denunciations, and the Church so far adhered to the Apostolic permission as to allow laymen to marry twice.